How to Destroy the Earth With a Coffee Can

It's not as easy to destroy the Earth as you might think; evil
geniuses everywhere have been trying for years. The problem lies
with the fact that the Earth is pretty big (at least compared to
you and me) and it takes quite a bit of energy to destroy it.
There is a way however, to do it with nothing more than a coffee
can.

You can easily do this project over
the course of a weekend, perhaps on Saturday afternoon. You'll have
to figure out for yourself where to spend Sunday.

Before I go too much further, there is a difference between
destroying the Earth and destroying life on Earth. It
takes much less energy to destroy all life, all you need to do
that is block out the Sun or release some kind of virus.

No, I'm talking about blowing the planet to bits. Vaporizing it.
I realize completely that by telling you this, I'll lose my
membership status in the Evil Genius Guild but in the fine
tradition of Make Magazine, I
wanted to share this with you.

The Problem

OK, so you've decided that you want to destroy the Earth this
Saturday. Good. Let's begin by understanding why it hasn't been
done already and what you'll need to do before someone else tries
it, say, next Saturday.

To completely vaporize the Earth, you'll need to overcome the Gravitational
Binding Energy of all of the atoms that hold the planet
together. This amounts to 224,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
Joules.

If you are uninspired, as so many evil geniuses are (sorry guys,
but you know you are), then you probably went to ThermoNuclear
Depot and tried to buy some nuclear weapons to do the job. Stan,
the nice guy who works in that department with the bright red
vest wearing a button that says 'Get Bent', told you that it would
take roughly 107,000,000,000,000 bombs to vaporize the planet (he
gets about three guys a week asking for the same thing). He
politely and cheerfully sends you to the Special Order department
to fill out one of their forms (they don't keep that many in
stock, and they are seasonal). Most evil geniuses are averse to
filling out forms, so you left.

Of course, this assumes you use the good stuff, the Hydrogen bomb.
You'd need a thousand times as many bombs if you went with the
old-style uranium kind.

But YOU are not that guy. You're inspired. You're a critical
thinker, an early-adopter. You like thinking outside the box
(after all, you're a regular visitor to my site, right? That
makes you remarkable all by itself.)

The Solution

This problem is easily overcome with something known as vacuum energy.
No, not the amount of energy generated by a Hoover cleaning a
carpet , but the latent energy that exists in absolutely nothing.
(DISCLAIMER: Do not even try to mess with the so-called Hoover
Vortex Energy. Handling that amount of energy requires special
suits and trained professionals at government supercollider
facilities. We just want to destroy the Earth here, not the
universe.)

What is vacuum
energy? It turns out that what we thought was full of nothing,
the vacuum of space, is actually a seething volume of matter,
anti-matter interactions. These interactions contain a lot of
energy. So much so that the number of these matter, anti-matter
collisions occurring in a space as small as a light bulb generates
enough energy to boil all of the Earth's oceans like a giant
teapot.

Boiling the oceans is, of course, a worthy enough goal for many
evil geniuses, but we're big thinkers here.

It's the
same energy that causes black holes to evaporate, for goodness
sakes.

The reason we don't all blow up due to this
energy is that the interactions happen very, very quickly, on a
timescale shorter than the Planck Time,
the shortest possible time interval science can measure. If
something happens in a shorter time than this, we have no hope
of measuring it.

Since they happen so quickly, the
average energy of these interactions remains zero, and we don't
blow up.

Of course, some people always have to harsh our buzz, don't they?
Many have suggested that this stuff isn't there and have responded
with the suspiciously pirate-sounding Trans-Planckian
Problem. Don't let that get in your way. Those people are
just upset they didn't think of this first.

The trick to getting vacuum energy to work for you is to slow
down the interactions so that they occur on a longer timescale.
We're not talking about a long time here, just longer than the
Planck time, which is only
0.000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,054
seconds. For heavens sakes, how hard could that be?

So the question becomes, how do you delay the interaction between
these subatomic particles long enough so we can extract the energy?
I suggest distracting them. By distracting the matter/anti-matter
particles for a little longer than the Planck time, the energy
becomes part of the real universe, the universe that we can
measure. Once that happens, we can harness it.

After extensive, exhaustive research on the subject, I've concluded
that subatomic matter/anti-matter particles really like looking
at pictures of Angelina Jolie. And really, who can blame them?

This is a perfect example of a simple solution to a complex
problem. Einstein would be proud (and a little embarrassed) and
I could care less what Stephen Hawking thinks (this'll teach him
for putting out that restraining order on me).

Procedure

This is the part you've been waiting for: how to do it. Well,
the first step is to get a coffee can. Since the volume of a
light bulb is enough to boil the oceans, I figure you'll need
something larger, like a coffee can, if you want to vaporize the
planet.

Take the coffee can and cut a small hole in one side (it doesn't
really matter if you leave the little plastic lid on or not).
This allows the subatomic particles inside to see the picture of
Angelina (you can use the one posted above, but believe me, there
are WAY better ones). Then, put the picture next to the coffee
can and RUN LIKE HELL.

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